The Girl Who Dripped Blood
by lovelydays
Summary: "My name is Johanna Mason and I have won the Hunger Games and this is who I am now." How a logger's daughter from District Seven became a murderer, celebrity, prostitute, drug addict, revolutionary, and then turned twenty-five. An origin story leading up to canon.


When the last cannon sounds I wipe the sweat from my forehead.

My hand comes away smeared with blood. I drop the ax at my side on the ground as I stare down at my blood-spattered palms. There's dried dark brown under my nails and I taste it in my mouth from where One Girl managed to sucker-punch me in the face and this is not how my life was supposed to turn out, I think weakly to myself, as my knees buckle and I drop to the ground and the wind blows and the boy from District One stares at me with glassy, lifeless eyes, a flood of cherry red seeping from his neck onto the dirt. His partner's body lies beneath him and I stare at what I've done and want to vomit but there's no food in my stomach to come up.

I won. This is the end. This is it. I survived. I won. No one is going to kill me. I'm safe. I'm going home. I won.

I don't know how long I've been in here. There was a box of protein bars in my backpack and I had taken to punching a hole in the lid for each passing night but I don't know where that box is anymore. It's been a week at the least, maybe two.

Time is frozen, or at least it seems like it is. The announcement doesn't come.

And then I realize that there must be one left. I am not the last.

My mind races as I consider the possibilities. I can't do this. I barely have the strength left to pull myself to a standing position. But I have to. I have to go home. I promised – I promised. I told Thatch and Simon and my parents I'd win and I told Murphy I'd go all the way after the Reaping. But one problem stands between myself and winning: I have no idea which of the others is left and no idea where they are. We could have miles between us now and I know I'll run out of food before I find them. So there's only one thing to do: make them come to me.

The easiest way to do that is a fire, but I don't have the supplies, and rubbing two sticks together would take ages. I settle on the next best thing, noise.

I take a deep breath, then scream, wordlessly, bloody murder, at the top of my lungs. There's no content to the scream, just a plain, piercing shriek that makes my own blood curdle.

I stop, fall silent. Wait. I can hear my own voice echo off the cliffs of the valley. I take another sip of water, and then scream again, even louder this time. My voice goes ragged at the end of this one and it's sharp, feral, the hunting call of a monster.

_Monster. Monster. Monster._ I repeat the word to myself. The clearing around the stream is almost too quiet. I can hear my heart pounding in my chest as I pick up my only weapon, the ax I earned when I made my first kill. I give it a few practice swings and then stand, pulsing with adrenaline, and scream once more.

There's a distant crunching of leaves. Could be an animal. My fingers tense around the sleek steel handle, so different from the ones we have back in Seven but equally useful. A stick snaps underneath a foot that is not mine and I turn, keyed up, to look into one glowing eye illuminated by the artificial moonlight the Gamemakers are pumping into the arena and keying up by the moment.

It's Girl Four.

I remember her the night of our interviews, shimmering and lovely and built for murder. She isn't like the normal Four Careers, the ones who went into the program out of fear. She was here out of choice, sultry with golden tan skin and graceful muscles and long hair that fell over one eye like a siren's. She had worn seashells on her breasts that night and laughed throatily at everything Caesar said to her and covered his hand with hers when she spoke to him. Now she stands here, swaying unsteadily across the clearing, one of her eye sockets an empty, bloody, nothingness.

I move toward her and she hisses, a wordless warning. I have a weapon and she does not and I falter. This is cruel. She was so beautiful. I can't do this. But my family's faces jump into my mind and I think of Murphy and I take another step toward her and draw back the ax and she screams as I bury it in the side of her head.

Four Girl falls to the ground and I yank my hammer away and the blood sprays everywhere. Head wounds are so dramatic. She's not dead yet – she's still screaming bloody murder and I gasp and slam my boot against her head, twisting it and stomping it into the ground, but she still screams. I keep my boot on her head and pound the ax into her chest, over and over and over until it bursts almost cartoonishly open and I half expect to see mechanics and gears instead of a heart pumping blood but no, she's real and she's human and I have just killed her and

My lip is split from the fight before this one and there's blood running down my chin, and I run my tongue around my mouth, checking to make sure my teeth are all still there. Small comfort that they are. I stay like this for a moment, hunched over with my foot on the girl's head. I can't tear my gaze away from her one now-unseeing eye.

I wipe the blood from my chin. Slam my foot down on her head once more for good measure as the adrenaline starts to drain from my body.

It feels like an eternity. But the announcement finally comes.

When the hovercraft descends upon me, they pull me inside, the Capitol medics in their bright white clothing, neat and clean and orderly. They slam a bottle of water, no cap, into my hand and at the same time, inject a syringe full of something into my arm.

My name is Johanna Mason and I have won the Hunger Games and this is who I am now. This is what I have done.


End file.
